There is a great deal of work done in distributed systems to pinpoint the root cause of an anomaly as quickly as possible, once the anomaly is detected by the system administrator. The work in this area is broadly classified as Problem Determination (PD) work. In most PD work, once an anomaly is detected, the system looks at the set of recent events to associate them with a failure. If the root cause event has happened asynchronously (that is, in the past), only the symptom events are seen, and the real root cause event (or events) is/are not even considered. Frequently, these root cause events are change events that are done deliberately by the system administrator in an asynchronous manner. Examples of these changes are applying a new patch of software, updating files (deletion, file permission changes), workload change or configuration changes (change in thread pool size, heap size, connection pool size), and the like. These changes are applied to fix existing problems and/or improve performance in the system, but they themselves may induce one or more of the following problems:                New bug(s) and/or problem(s) due to mismatch between real environment and test environment.        May conflict with existing environment.        Partial application of changes due to lack of understanding of total IT stack.        
Studies have found that most problems happen in an IT system due to deliberate changes made by the system administrator to fix existing problems. Existing change management systems are management tools that merely record the change history.